Making Noise in Youth Marketing

By Jay Mark Caplan

Nick Barham is planning director of Wieden and Kennedy, the agency behind the 2008 Converse Love Noise campaign. Fans of Chinese indie rock lauded the Converse- sponsored five city rock road trip and the campaign built around it as a great platform for Chinese bands. Converse certainly cemented the loyalty of the niche indie rock audience. But how do mainstream Chinese youth relate to their ‘edgier’ peers? Are rockers viable influencers? Here Barham speaks at length about youth marketing in China and teaming up with emerging youth cultures to reach a mass audience.

CY: What was the idea behind Lovenoise?

Nick: When we started working with Converse, we wanted to come up with something more meaningful than what other youth brands were doing, something that has a better connection with the audience.

CY: What kind of marketing did you want to depart from?

Nick: Most youth brands have a similar strategy: they all identify one or more safe and highly visible celebrities, and create a brand world or image that’s aspirational - perfect and slick, and they communicate an anodyne bland message. In markets like Europe or the US, a lot of brands have co-opted an underground aesthetic, a rebellious point of view.  They have explicitly gone out of their way to make tightly targeted communications that might not be understood by the older generation, consciously appropriating a rougher language. I don’t think that’s happening here, and I don’t think that’s because younger kids can’t understand it or take it in, I think that’s where brands are at. Most marketing is happening at a safer level.

CY: Why do you think everyone is locked in this model?

Nick: There’s a mainstream dream that’s been peddled in China which goes: if you’re a good kid, and do well in exams, go to college, then you’ll get a nice white collar job and house with a mortgage. This is the middle class promise being held out to families, to people growing up in China, and a lot of people are still at the point where that’s massively interesting.

Being edgy, having a provocative or slightly rebellious attitude, is a luxury, and it comes once you’ve got the basics of enough money to have food, clothes, education.  So in a lot of tier two, three or four cities, many kids are still very interested in branded clothes, or not working at the shitty job their parents had and having something slightly better. They’re looking for more comfort or more material goods or a higher income, and are not that interested in a particular style or attitude that challenges the mainstream because they haven’t even made it into the mainstream yet.

So by that definition, I think you can understand why a lot of brands don’t want to come up with confrontational or provocative messages because it’s completely over the heads of the emerging middle class audience interested in material goods and status rather than turning things on their head.

CY: If that’s the case, what choice do marketers have?

Nick: Brands should be brave enough to behave differently, because young people are more tolerant to difference, although it depends on how you do it. The way you talk about edginess must be different than elsewhere. Converse is about rebellion and original creativity, and that has a different sense here than in other countries. You have to be edgy without being negative or destructive or too rebellious.

CY: Are edgy youth viable influencers for campaigns?

Nick: I don’t think there necessarily is an influence connection between edgy kids and mainstream kids.

We did some interviews with skateboarders, and they look like skateboarders everywhere else: they have the clothes, the moves- they look like a cool subculture. But they believe that other kids in their age group see them as scruffy losers, not as having chosen to do something that is about free will and self expression and hanging out, but as dropouts that don’t have any money.

This is particularly interesting amongst professional skateboarders, people who are being paid or supported by brands, and therefore making fair bit of money out of skateboarding, because they’re still perceived by people outside the scene as dropouts or losers despite the fact that they probably have a better income than people making those judgments.

CY: Why did Converse choose to work with Chinese rock and roll?

Nick: Converse is a lucky brand: if you look through rock history you find people like Sid Vicious and Kurt Cobain wearing Converse. That strong connection with music is especially interesting in China [where rock music is relatively new]. We felt, here is a lively creative scene, and no brands have gone there because it doesn’t fit their model of what an interesting aspirational scene should look like.

CY: So in doing the Love Noise campaign, what was your strategy for using indie rock figures to reach the mainstream?

Nick: We tried to share the spirit that inspires people in bands in a form that went beyond people who are hardcore into indie music. The Love Noise road trip appeals to a few hundred thousand people, and we captured it in a photographic and film campaign that makes that spirit appealing to a broader group of people, and gives these niche musicians broader visibility and appeal. If you look at the work, I think it strikes a nice balance between a unique aesthetic and captures that scene spirit, but without presenting something too niche or grubby or difficult.

CY: Was this a successful approach?

Nick: I think it worked out pretty well; since that campaign you’ve seen a lot of brands adopting a similar message and aesthetic suggesting that this kind of creativity now has more credibility, and is becoming more aspirational.

Guest blogger Jay Mark Caplan: Over the last four years, Jay has been in Greater China working as an advertising copywriter, market researcher, blogger, and television show host. Currently, Jay is back in Canada working in film production and applying to Masters programs, but he will certainly return to China soon.

Filed under: Great Minds Think Alike Or Not, So What?, China youth culture, Converse Love Noise campaign, edgy youth, Jay Mark Caplan, skateboarders, W+K, Youth marketing